Overview

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Are Victorian roads getting safer ?

Introduction & Overview

Road safety is everyone’s responsibility. Any safety incident on the road has the potential to change someone’s life in an instant. With advances in road safety measures such as advanced traffic control, improved road networks, and relatively safer cars, I wanted to investigate if Victorian roads are getting any safer?

Vicroads, is a government organisation managing road infrastructure in the state of Victoria. Vicroads has provided a very rich open data set in relation to road crashes from 2006 to date under Creative Commons license. Please refer to “@ Data” page for more details on the data used for this analysis.

Analysis approach

Data consists of various variables related to an incident, from the type of vehicle , type of accident, people involved, accident severity, environmental factors, and many more. Using all these variables can draw a more accurate conclusions but for the scope of this work, I have focused on the following 3 key basic elements.

  1. Number of accidents over a period of time

To understand and explore any patterns over years and any specific patterns within that time period.

  1. Accident severity

Accidents can be minor or major from simple fender benders to multiple fatalities. Understanding this will help us focus on the root cause for major incidents.

  1. Type of accidents

Understanding the type of accident is crucial to explore areas for improvement. e.g. If more pedestrians are killed then we need to focus on pedestrian safety mechanisms.

Conclusion

There is a noticeable reduction in the number of road accidents from 2017 including a 57% reduction in 2020 compared to 2019 due to widespread restrictions. One noticeable difference was reduction in medium severity incidents compared to low and high severity incidents. On a closer look, there is no noticeable difference in the number of fatalities excluding 2020 with the majority involved in a collision with fixed objects or vehicles and surprisingly Pedestrians.

This analysis concludes that there is a positive trend of reduction in medium severity impacts, at the same time more analysis is needed to understand and develop strategies to reduce number of fatalities.

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1.Incident Overview

  • Starting with a quick overview of the number of incidents over a period of time to understand any obvious patterns. And there seems to be a downward trend in the number of incidents with a major reduction in 2020 due to a reduction in traffic volume.

  • Looking at the monthly breakdown, there are on an average 1000 to 1200 accidents per month, with a clear exception to 2020. Now it is time to understand the severity of these accidents (go to tab 2)

2.Severity Analysis

  • Number of accidents only tell part of the story, general aim of this sort of analysis is to find ways to reduce road trauma, but when developing strategies focus should be based on high impact outcomes, which in this case is the number of fatalities, following visual segments the accidents based on their severity, and immediately we can see that there is a downward trend in Medium severity accidents but not so much change in High severity (fatalities).

  • On a closer look at accidents involving fatalities, the following visual aims to understand a broad effect of weather conditions, the holiday season, Which seems to indicate Feb, March, and December have a higher probability of accidents involving fatalities. We also need to understand how or what contributing to these  fatalities to understand that (go to tab 3)

3.Type of Incident analysis

  • Fatalities mostly seem to have been involved with collisions with a fixed object, other vehicles, and pedestrians covering more than 93% of fatalities. Majority between 43% involving collision with vehicles and 36% involving fixed objects. The next step is to examine the type of vehicles involved and environmental & geographic conditions to understand the underlying reasons for these fatalities.

  • Please select different type of collisions to see their trend over time

About Dashboard

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About this Dashbaord

  • Storytelling with open data

  • MATH2404: Data Visualisation and Communication

  • Author: Srihari.Konda

  • Reference material: Data visualisation: From theory to practice, by Dr James Baglin

  • Development environment

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Crash Stats - Information about data set

CrashStats data is provided to users by VicRoads for the purpose of supplying information about road crashes in Victoria for educational purposes.

The data provided allows users to analyse Victorian fatal and injury crash data based on time, location, conditions, crash type, road user type, object hit etc.

File ACCIDENT.zip contains the following files extracted from the VicRoads CrashStats database. See Additional Information for the period of data extract.

The files are as follows:

Tables

  • accident (basic accident details, time, severity, location)

  • person (person based details, age, sex etc)

  • vehicle (vehicle based data, vehicle type, make etc)

  • accident_event (sequence of events e.g. left road, rollover, caught fire)

  • road_surface_cond (whether road was wet, dry, icy etc)

  • atmospheric_cond (rain, winds etc)

  • sub_dca (detailed codes describing accident)

  • accident_node (master location table - NB subset of accident table)

  • Node Table with Lat/Long references

The files contained are documented in the CrashStats User Guide and Appendix, accessible at:

http://data.vicroads.vic.gov.au/metadata/crashstats_user_guide_and_appendices.pdf

Additional Information Field Value